A brief history of co-operative inquiry
John Heron
An updated extract from Chapter 1, Co-operative Inquiry, London,
Sage, 1996.
Co-operative inquiry involves two or more people researching a topic
through their own experience of it, using a series of cycles in which they
move between this experience and reflecting together on it. Each person
is co-subject in the experience phases and co-researcher in the reflection
phases. While this model has affinities with the account of action research
and experiential learning arising from the work of Kurt Lewin (1952), its
source, range of application and epistemology - as I have conceived these
- are quite distinct, and take it on to a different plane. It is a vision
of persons in reciprocal relation using the full range of their sensibilities
to inquire together into any aspect of the human condition with which the
transparent body-mind can engage.
The co-operative inquiry model was born, in my world, in 1968-69 when
I started to reflect on the experience of mutual gazing in interpersonal
encounters. Out of this experience I wrote a paper called 'The phenomenology
of social encounter: the gaze' which was published in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research (Heron, 1970). To cut a long paper short,
I made several points about the gaze:
-
It is a distinct phenomenal category which cannot be reduced to any set
of statements about the eyes as physical objects
-
Its combination of both spatial and mental properties involves a non-Cartesian
account of mind
-
It provides participative noninferential but partial knowledge of the state
of mind of the other
-
Its inherent mutuality of meaning is presupposed by, and the ground of,
the use of speech
I also made the point that the conventional social scientist cannot properly
inquire into the nature of the gaze by doing experiments on and gathering
data from other people. The status and significance of the gaze can only
be explored fully from within, by full engagement with the human condition.
This means the researcher is also the socially sensitive subject involved
in mutual gazing with another. There was the unstated implication that
any such research, in which experimenter and subject are one and the same
person, would also be co-operative, involving a reciprocal relation with
another person with the same double role.
From March 1970 there was an influx of experiential groups of many kinds
in London, Various verbal and nonverbal one-to-one exercises, followed
by shared feedback, were in vogue. Exploring these convinced me that only
shared experience and shared reflection on it could yield a social science
that did justice to the human condition. I thought that the researcher
who wants to do research on or about other people's experience of the human
condition is not only likely to misrepresent it, but is open to the charge
of being in flight from a full openness to his or her own experience. Moreover,
the misrepresentation and the flight are likely to reinforce each other.
Also in 1970 I felt that the human condition within myself, in relating
with others, and on the wider canvas, was about increasing self-direction
in living, in co-operation with other persons similarly engaged. And that
this quest for personal and social transformation, for the interacting
values of autonomy and co-operation, was at the heart of any truly human
social science.
Many cultural strands of the postwar decades fed into this view: the
focus on freedom, and on the person as self-creating, in continental personalism
and existentialism; Macmurray's account (1957) of the self as agent in
reciprocal relation with other agents; the reaffirmation among many English-speaking
academic philosophers of Kantian views of human freedom, autonomy and rational
agency as transcending 'determination by alien causes' (Peters, 1958; Kenny,
1963; Taylor, 1966); the affirmation of self-directed and whole person
learning by Rogers (1969), and of self-esteem and self-actualization by
both Rogers (1961) and Maslow (1962); the humanistic, participative, democratic
values and technologies of experiential learning and action research emerging
from T-groups and laboratory method and the work of Kurt Lewin (Bradford
et al, 1964); the Leicester-Tavistock conferences on group dynamics; a
paper by Sid Jourard (1967) on experimenter-subject dialogue; the values
of the civil rights and anti-war student struggles of the sixties in the
USA and of the students' mentor Marcuse (1964); the women's liberation
movement of the sixties and the feminist texts of Friedman (1963), Millett
(1969) and Greer (1970); the emergence of radical action and body oriented
therapies from the pioneer work of Moreno and Reich; the appearance of
peer self-help groups of diverse kinds as a major social phenomenon; the
occurrence of holistic and systemic models of explanation for organic and
psychosocial life, as in Koestler (1964), von Bertalanffy (1968); and so
on.
In November 1970 I founded the Human Potential Research Project at the
University of Surrey to explore what a person-centred science might be
like, and presented a paper about it at the annual conference of the British
Psychological Society in 1971. About seventy psychologists attended the
session and seemed to find it an entertaining distraction from the mainline
offerings of the day. This paper, 'Experience and Method', was published
in 1971 as a monograph by the University of Surrey, and was my first formal
account of co-operative inquiry. In those days I called it experiential
research.
In it I argued that the basic explanatory model for creative, original
research behaviour is that of intelligent self-direction. Original researchers
in any field, because they generate new ideas that are in principle unpredictable,
are the free, autonomous cause of their own behaviour, which thus transcends
any sufficient explanation in terms of causal laws of physical or psychic
determinism. Such researchers in psychology cannot with any consistency
exhibit this autonomous explanatory model in their own behaviour and at
the same time deny its relevance to the behaviour of their subjects, for
example, by explaining their behaviour in terms of strict causal determinism.
I then suggested that the central research question for psychology is
'How can self-directing capacity be developed?', and that this question
can only properly be answered, logically and morally, from the standpoint
of the agent, that is, of the person who is developing their self-directing
capacity. Thus the researcher is necessarily also the inquiring agent,
who is both experimenter and subject combined.
I took it as a fundamental assumption of the method that self-directing
persons develop most fully through fully reciprocal relations with other
self-directing persons. Autonomy and co-operation are necessary and mutually
enhancing values of human life. Hence experiential research involved a
co-equal relation between two people, reversing the roles of facilitator
and agent, or combining them at the same time.
They would support each other in applying to themselves, on a peer basis,
some theory of personal development, where any such theory would involve
relations between the potential self, the socially conditioned self, the
directing self and the transformed self. The examples I suggested were
co-counselling (Jackins, 1965; Scheff, 1971), transactional analysis (Berne,
1961), bio-energetic analysis (Lowen, 1970). They would also give each
other feedback, and together evaluate the theory in the light of their
experience of it.
As well as, or instead of, this personal development approach, they
could explore the ongoing dyadic relation itself and its potential. And
both approaches could be developed by a larger number of people using group
interaction methods. The paper also looked at issues of validity, compared
and contrasted the experiential method with the traditional experimental
method in psychology, and considered their relative advantages and disadvantages,
especially the problem of consensus collusion in experiential research.
In October 1971 I applied the method, through the Human Potential Research
Project at the University of Surrey, in an adult education 20-week training
course in co-counselling. The training was at the same time an experiential
peer inquiry, including myself, into the theory and practice of co-counselling.
An account of this rudimentary endeavour was published in the British
Journal of Guidance and Counselling (Heron, 1972).
Looking back now on the original paper and this early application of
it, some obvious limitations stand out. While the paper was clear about
the danger of consensus collusion, it had no suggestions about how to counter this; nor did it consider any other validity procedures as they were
called later. It said nothing about research cycling, moving to and fro
between experience and reflection. It considered as topics for inquiry
only personal and interpersonal growth through mutual aid; it did not address
social and political issues such as disempowerment and oppression; nor
did it consider the the wider reaches of research that embrace any aspect
of the human condition.
During the seventies I continued to apply the method in rudimentary
form in workshops on a wide range of topics, and as facilitator was also
the initiating researcher inviting participants to be co-inquirers. These
workshops were run informally in the spirit of co-operative inquiry, certainly
not with any rigour: the participative method was improvisatory, not highly
formalized. As well as personal growth through mutual aid, the topics included:
the elements of human communication and encounter; intrapsychic states
and processes; interpersonal and professional skills; group dynamic phenomena;
altered states of consciousness; peer self-help networks; peer learning
community; peer review audit of professional practice (Heron 1973a, 1973b,
1974a, 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1974e, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c,
1977d, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1979).
During this period three developments occurred. The first was an interim
account of experiential research method (Heron, 1977a), which affirmed
the interdependence between phenomenological mapping and intentional action:
between noticing phenomena and trying out new behaviours. The second was
the importance of applying peer experiential research in the burgeoning
field of transpersonal psychology (Heron, 1975b) as a counter to the dogmatic
intuitionism and traditional authoritarianism to which spiritual experience
so readily falls prey. The third was to extend co-operative inquiry, as
a project for the future, to include all aspects of social life in what
I call a self-generating culture (Heron, 1978c), as a counter to prevailing
forms of social oppression and disempowerment.
A self-generating culture, I should explain in passing, is a society
whose members are in a continuous process of co-operative learning and
development, and whose forms are consciously adopted, periodically reviewed
and altered in the light of experience, reflection and deeper vision. Its
participants continually recreate it through cycles of collaborative inquiry
in living. It includes several strands: forms of decision-making and political
participation; forms of association; forms of habitation; revisioning a
wide range of social roles; forms of economic organization; forms of ecological
management; forms of education for all ages; forms of intimacy and parenting;
forms of conflict resolution; forms of aesthetic expression and celebration;
forms of transpersonal association and ritual (Heron 1993a).
In 1978 Peter Reason, John Rowan and I set up the New Paradigm Research
Group in London. Peter had realized in his postgraduate work that it is
impossible to conduct intimate inquiry into human relationships as an outsider
(Reason, 1976). John had distributed in 1976 his seminal paper 'A Dialectical
Paradigm for Research' (Rowan, 1981). The New Paradigm
Research Group met every three weeks or so for three years and provided
a major forum for the development of creative thinking and of practical
projects in the field, including my own. It also set the scene for Peter
and John editing their breakthrough work Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook
of New Paradigm Research (Reason and Rowan, 1981a).
I contributed two chapters to this (Heron, 1981a, 1981b). The philosophical
one expanded the case for co-operative inquiry in several directions beyond
the 1971 paper, including a new argument from an extended epistemology,
about the interdependence of propositional, practical and experiential
knowledge. The methodological chapter introduced the snowperson diagram
(see below figure 3.1, chapter 3) and gave a more coherent account of the
stages of the co-operative inquiry cycle, in terms of this extended epistemology.
Peter and John wrote an important chapter (Reason and Rowan, 1981c)
on issues of validity in new paradigm research, which was influential in
my own thinking. Peter and I then began an active phase of collaboration
in developing together the methodology of co-operative inquiry. We initiated
two inquiries with co-counselling colleagues (Heron and Reason, 1981, 1982).
These together with an inquiry I launched in 1981 on altered states of
consciousness (Heron, 1988b), led to a paper of mine on validity in co-operative
inquiry which set out a whole range of validity procedures and associated
skills (Heron, 1982b; revised and restated in Heron, 1988a). After over
a decade of preliminaries, and with the strong creative input of Peter
Reason, co-operative inquiry had acquired an innovative, rigorous and coherent
form.
The next step was to apply the method in a more substantial setting.
This proved to be at the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, University
of London, where I was then Assistant Director. I invited Peter Reason
to join me in initiating with a group of general practitioners a co-operative
inquiry into whole person medicine, which ran from the summer of 1982 to
the summer of 1983 (Heron and Reason, 1985; Reason, 1988c). Peter and I
then started to share the fruits of four years of collaborative thinking
and action, authoring a series of papers presenting co-operative inquiry
to a wider audience (Heron and Reason, 1984, 1986a, 1986b; Heron, 1985;
Reason, 1986, 1988d; Reason and Heron 1995).
Since the mid-eighties, the academic centre for co-operative inquiry
and related forms of participative research in the UK has been sustained
by Peter Reason and colleagues, and their Postgraduate Research Group,
in the School of Management at the University of Bath. This centre hosted
the pioneer newsletter Collaborative Inquiry, edited by Peter Reason,
which was issued three times a year from 1990 to the last edition in May,
1997. (It is now replaced by the CARPP web site, see below). The centre
also hosts annual conferences on participative approaches to inquiry. It
has generated a diversity of research projects, many in the field of professional
practice, and two important books edited by Peter Reason (1988b, 1994a).
The first of these, Human Inquiry in Action, in its introduction
and first two chapters, gives a well-grounded, accessible account of co-operative
inquiry in its developed form. The second, Participation in Human Inquiry,
includes Peter's important perspective on participative knowing. Both include
a wide range of research reports by a number of different inquiry groups.
This work, including other approaches to participative inquiry, became
formally constituted in 1994 as the Centre for Action Research in Professional
Practice, directed by Peter Reason. CARPP hosted an international conference
on Quality in Human Inquiry in March, 1995. The work of CARPP, including
PhD and MPhil theses, will be published on its web site at http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp
I left the British Postgraduate Medical Federation at the end of 1985
to pursue an independent career as consultant, educator, researcher and
writer. In 1989-90 I established an International
Centre for Co-operative Inquiry in Tuscany, Italy, where I have
initiated a range co-operative inquiries in the transpersonal field, and,
in micro-format, the shared experience of a self-generating culture, with
participants from Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, UK,
USA. I have also initiated related inquiries in New Zealand, where I have
been commuting for several months each year. This work (Heron, 1993b, 1995) is the subject of a separate
volume, Sacred Science (1998)
References
For details of the references in this updated extract, see Heron, J.
Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition, London,
Sage, 1996. See author's blurb for information
on this work and how to order it.